PR for pigeons: Woman’s mission to give the birds a better image

By Caroline Lowbridge

BBC News, Nottingham

Gutter birds, sky rats, vermin – pigeons don’t have the best reputation, but one woman is on a mission to change that. Hannah Hall explains how she intends to tackle “pigeon prejudice” with a new charity.

It was a chance encounter in a beer garden that changed Hannah’s life.

She had gone to the pub with some friends on a bank holiday two years ago, in May 2022, when a little pigeon hopped on the bench she was sitting on.

“The pigeon sat next to my friend, who I didn’t know then has an incredible bird phobia, so she freaked out and jumped up and wanted to swap places,” Hannah recalls.

Hannah carried on chatting to her friends while the pigeon was sitting calmly next to her.

“And then the weirdest, weirdest thing happened. She came across the bench and then she hopped up on to my lap,” says Hannah.

A waitress told Hannah the pigeon had been inside the pub but people had been kicking her, so the waitress had to shoo the pigeon out to protect it.

Three and a half hours later, the pigeon had still not left Hannah’s side.

“It was crazy because at one point she was on my arm, at one point she was on my shoulder, nestled into my hair. At one point she was on my head. I was like, ‘this is bizarre’,” Hannah says.

When it was time for Hannah to go back to her home in Nottingham, the waitress asked her if she was taking the pigeon.

Then, a group of students walked past and told Hannah how some other students had been throwing the pigeon earlier in the evening, trying to make her fly.

Hannah knew the pigeon was in need and there was no way she could leave her.

“So, on my shoulder she popped and I walked her to my car,” says Hannah.

“My friends said goodbye to me and said I was absolutely crazy.”

Hannah, who works in the NHS, turned to social media for advice. She already had a TikTok channel, external, in which she shares her love of vintage, particularly about the 1940s.

“So I was like ‘this is what happened to me on Monday night. If anybody knows what I should do, I’d love a bit of feedback’,” says Hannah.

“And 27 million views later, the entire world was invested in this little pigeon. The internet named her, they voted on Penny, because she was lucky and pennies are supposed to be lucky.”

Following the initial video of Hannah befriending the pigeon, she set up a dedicated TikTok account for Penny, external that gained more than 300,000 followers.

Hannah also wrote a children’s book about Penny, and Hannah and Penny were filmed for a 50-minute TV programme.

But Penny unfortunately started to have health problems.

“She had a liver problem, an abscess that we never would have known was there,” says Hannah.

“What’s heartbreaking is that the vet said it was probably from being kicked.”

Hannah says she spent thousands of pounds treating Penny, who was put on a course of antibiotics.

Then Hannah went to check on Penny one day and had a strange feeling.

“Me and Penny had always had this very strange connection. I knew what she was trying to tell me and I knew what she was trying to communicate,” says Hannah.

“And I went up the stairs and my mum was behind me, and halfway up the stairs my brain went, ‘she’s dead’. And when I got to the bedroom she’d died.”

Hannah had learned CPR for birds in preparation and tried to resuscitate Penny, but it was too late.

“I felt so devastated,” says Hannah.

Hannah was left with an empty aviary and was too heartbroken to adopt another pigeon.

“I was like ‘well I’m never getting pigeons again. I can’t even look at a pigeon any more without crying, it’s never going to happen’,” she says.

But she decided to carry on – as she puts it, “for Penny’s sake” – and help rescue more pigeons.

She initially took in four baby pigeons, which had been found in a loft and were going to be culled.

Three of the four pigeons still live with Hannah and her mum now, but one flew the nest after finding “a feral pigeon she took a fancy to”.

Her current flock includes a lost racing pigeon who needed a home because his owner did not want to collect him. He was skittish to start with but now eats out of her hand, Hannah says.

Not content with helping a handful of pigeons at home, Hannah decided she wanted to help the birds on a much bigger scale.

“People are so cruel to pigeons; they don’t see them as living creatures,” says Hannah.

“So I thought to myself, ‘this is awful, I can’t have this any more’, and so I decided to start a pigeon welfare charity.”

Penny’s Pigeon Aid was founded in January with two other women who are passionate about pigeons.

One of the charity’s aims is to change how people perceive pigeons, in the hope they will be kinder to them.

But aren’t pigeons really unhygienic?

“It is vanishingly rare to get sick from contact with pigeon droppings or contact with a pigeon,” says Hannah, who blames “not very nice pieces of propaganda” 60 years ago for changing how people view them.

“It turns out in the 1960s, there was an article produced where two deaths were falsely blamed on pigeons and not long after that, the New York parks commissioner coined the term ‘rats with wings’,” she says.

“And then in the 1980s, a film by Woody Allen said that line, ‘rats with wings’, and so the public started using that term, and ever since then their reputation just got worse and worse.”

Dr Charles Walcott, who studied pigeons for 20 years at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, external in the US, agrees that it is a myth the birds are dirty.

“In general pigeons are pretty clean; they really don’t deserve their reputation as flying rats,” he says.

“They are really quite an extraordinary bird. Imagine trying to make your life in London on the streets. What are you going to eat and where do you find a nest? It’s kind of impressive that they are able to do all that.”

Before pigeons gained their bad reputation, Hannah says they were valued and even saved lives in wartime.

“I was like ‘this is such a coincidence, I’m a 1940s girl, I love posting content about it’, and it turns out pigeons were incredibly important during World War Two – 250,000 of them were flown over enemy lines to transport vital messages,” says Hannah.

“There’s pigeons like Cher Ami who saved lives because of managing to deliver messages.”

After more research, Hannah says she discovered how intelligent pigeons are.

“I found out pigeons can recognise the alphabet, pigeons can do mathematics, external – simple mathematics, probably better than me though – and pigeons can recognise their own reflection, which is very rare, and pigeons can recognise cancer in humans,” she says.

The American psychologist B F Skinner did numerous experiments with pigeons, teaching them to play ping-pong, and even training them to operate a pigeon-guided missile in World War Two. However, the missile was never used, with Skinner saying, “our problem was no-one would take us seriously”.

Hannah believes one reason people don’t like pigeons is because there are so many feral ones.

“The whole reason there are loads of them is because when we didn’t need them any more, we abandoned them,” she says.

“So it’s like if we all of a sudden all went, ‘do you know what? I don’t think we should keep dogs as pets any more, let’s all turf our dogs out into the street’, and there would be dogs everywhere.”

People have complained that pigeons cause a nuisance when they nest in cities – where there is a food supply – and leave droppings on buildings.

This is something the charity eventually hopes to tackle, by encouraging councils to make better nesting sites for pigeons, keeping buildings safe.

But for now the charity is aiming to “gently push” its ethos, for example by making social media content that tells people about pigeon history.

“I often make funny videos on the TikTok channel about how they served us in World War Two,” says Hannah.

“And funny videos about how the robin keeps getting crowned Britain’s national bird and the pigeon has done so much more for the nation than the robin has, videos like that.

“We are not expecting everybody to suddenly fall in love with them, we’re just expecting or hoping that people will be humane and at least not cause any unnecessary cruelty.”

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